Endless expansion recasts individuals as mere functions of the process

Evidence

What overcame Rhodes’s monstrous innate vanity and made him discover the charms of secrecy was the same thing that overcame Cromer’s innate sense of duty: the discovery of an expansion which was not driven by the specific appetite for a specific country but conceived as an endless process in which every country would serve only as stepping-stone for further expansion. In view of such a concept, the desire for glory can no longer be satisfied by the glorious triumph over a specific people for the sake of one’s own people, nor can the sense of duty be fulfilled through the consciousness of specific services and the fulfillment of specific tasks. No matter what individual qualities or defects a man may have, once he has entered the maelstrom of an unending process of expansion, he will, as it were, cease to be what he was and obey the laws of the process, identify himself with anonymous forces that he is supposed to serve in order to keep the whole process in motion; he will think of himself as mere function, and eventually consider such functionality, such an incarnation of the dynamic trend, his highest possible achievement. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 554

Categorization

• DEFINE: Arendt here defines the mechanism by which expansion-as-process produces the ‘man as mere function’ — a core concept for the scaffolding the reader is assembling.
• XREF: This ‘maelstrom of process turning persons into functions’ is a key theoretical hinge that should connect forward to biopolitics/necropolitics readings on how subjects get reduced to functions of administrative systems.
• DEEPTHINKING: The idea that a supra-personal process rewrites even the psychology of the powerful—transforming them into instruments—is dense and repay re-reading when connecting to bureaucratic exclusion of the stateless.